Twelve Months

Genre: Romance / Sci-Fi… maybe a little angst, but nothing heavy. Lots of fluff and nearly ALL Jack and Ianto.
No serious plot line, just lots of character interaction.

Rating: T – some minor harsh language… and let's face it Jack's in it, so that means there's going to be some sexual innuendo. He can't help himself. ;-)

Synopsis: Jack has known for a long time how much Ianto wants children of his own and where there's a will (and a Time Lord), there is a way…

Timeline: set shortly after Reunion… I wasn't going to post this just yet, but after a series of blucky rainy days, I ended up pretty much finishing it and patience just isn't one of my virtues…

Hopefully I'll have another chapter up on everything I've got going before the weekend (I've got partial chapters written)… I can't believe I have class tomorrow, the day before one the biggest cooking holidays in the United States!

Chapter One: 4992

"Every tomorrow has two handles. We can take hold of it with the handle of anxiety or the handle of faith." Henry Ward Beecher

"Well, Mr. Jones, are you ready for your first look at humanity's future?" the Doctor's tone was entirely too light for the young Welshman's comfort.

Just the same, Ianto wouldn't be the one to bring up the last time he'd seen the future. Admittedly he'd seen it right in his own time, when the Daleks had hijacked the Earth. They had been taken to a place out of time… out of space… to the Medusa Cascade, this giant rift in time and space. Just the same, Ianto understood that the Daleks represented the future. One possible future, at any rate, for humanity.

They, like the Cybermen had been human once, or something very close to it. He knew what the future would have looked like if Davros and the Dalek Emperor had succeeded… if the Cybermen gained a foothold on Earth or any other planet ever again. He knew what the Toclophane really were… would be. Had been. Might never be.

Jack took his hand and gave it a tight squeeze, seeming to understand the anxiety he saw in the younger man's face. Ianto wasn't like him, he didn't get the adrenaline rush when he was charging into the unknown… running for his life from alien and monsters.

Ianto liked things to be organized. Tidy. Boxed up and categorized. He made to-do lists. Every night before he went to bed, he wrote a carefully thought out list of the things he needed to accomplish the next day. As he drank his coffee the next morning, he went back over his list and amended anything that sleeping on it had made him believe he needed to amend… then he re-wrote his list in the order in which he anticipated completing each task. He often included the steps he thought he might have to take in order to accomplish the things on his list. After all, he wasn't operating in a vacuum. If he wanted to make sure he had time to do the grocery shopping, he would have to stay on top of eight or nine other things through out the day.

Not everything got accomplished, of course. Family life interfered. Aliens invaded. The rift spit out strange technology that disrupted their lives.

Ianto was flexible. He wasn't stuck to his lists. He didn't become (overly) agitated when he was forced to go off track to attend to something unforeseeable, especially when that something was important. And he recognized that sneaking off for ice cream with Jack was just as important as dealing with invading Raxacoricofallapatarians, an unexpectedly unpleasant call from Jason's head master, or his own sudden urge to reorganize every drawer in the staff kitchen because he couldn't find something and had become infuriated with the state of disarray things could so quickly fall into.

Besides, anything that didn't get accomplished one day could easily be shifted to the next day's list – presuming it was still relevant. Family emergencies and invading aliens had a way of changing one's priorities. Very few things were carved into stone, even on Ianto's lists.

"Come on then," the Doctor coaxed. "This is going to be your home for the next year." His tone was softer as he opened up the TARDIS doors. "It's a lovely little planet… well… moon really. Planet itself is uninhabitable, at least by humans."

Swallowing back the last of his fears, Ianto picked up his suitcase. All Jack had was a duffle bag full of clothes, most of which wouldn't fit him in a couple of months anyway. The Welshman gave his partner a nervous little glance and stepped out into the brilliant sunlight with Jack just behind him; as soon as he was clear of the narrow TARDIS door, Jack took his hand again.

"What do you think?" he asked.

The young man blinked, shading his eyes. The Doctor had landed the TARDIS in what appeared to be a lightly wooded park, although the spot seemed well out of the way of foot traffic. Thankfully. Unlike Jack, he didn't like to make grand entrances. Even when he'd been trying to worm his way into Torchwood, he'd only been as dramatic as he had been to catch Jack's attention. And save him from that Weevil… how was he supposed to know Jack was immortal?

He looked up into the alien sky. "It's blue." There were little wisps of white clouds… it didn't look alien at all.

Jack smiled.

"And… the grass… it's green," the Welshman breathed. Over the tops of the trees, he could see the tallest buildings of the city, all glass and metal. "It looks like Cardiff."

"A little bit, yes," agreed Jack, his smile never wavering.

"There's the facility there," The Doctor pointed to a tall white building; there was a green crescent moon painted on the side of it. Jack had explained that that was the universal symbol for hospitals. The Doctor went on: "And you two have been secured lodging in that apartment building there," he pointed to a building on the opposite side of the park.

Ianto blinked. "It looks so much like home…" he continued to look around, waiting for the alien-ness to hit him. Finally… "What's that smell?"

"What smell?"

"Lavender… lemon…?"

"Oh. Probably those, I reckon," the Doctor pointed to a clump of bright yellow flowers.

"They're lovely… Cariad…?"

Jack just nodded. "Amberdeillias, I think. Doctor?"

The Time Lord shrugged. "No idea really."

"They're not poisonous are they?" asked Ianto. "Or man eating or something…?"

"Man eating daisies?" The Doctor queried in an incredulous tone.

Jack was laughing, "No, they're not poisonous or man eating, Sweetheart." He let go of Ianto's hand so the younger man could go have a closer look. To the Doctor's quizzical expression, he mouthed the word 'Krynoid'.

"Oh dear."

Jack just shrugged. It wasn't the worst thing they'd ever wrangled and all in all, the incident had been as close to uneventful as it got.

The Welshman looked up from the flowers when he felt Jack's arms around his waist. "You doing ok?" the older man asked softly into his ear. He pressed his lips to the back of his partner's neck.

Ianto smiled, "I think so." He wasn't sure it was the truth, but so far, so good. The sky was a comforting shade of blue and he hadn't been eaten by the local flora.

"Come on," Jack took his hand again. "Let's go get settled in…"

The walk to the apartment building took less than ten minutes; they passed by a pair of men with two small children. One of the men was pregnant. They greeted the trio with a friendly smile.

Ianto blinked. "They were human," he said quietly, after he was sure they'd passed well out of earshot.

"Most of the people around here are," the Doctor told him. "I thought you might feel a bit more at home that way."

"But there are aliens… I mean… in this era? Humans have made contact?" If the twenty first century was when it all was supposed to have changed…

"Humans have made contact all kinds species," Jack assured him. "Most of them friendly," he added, raising his eyebrows suggestively.

"Don't you go getting too friendly, Captain," warned the Time Lord.

Jack shot him a wry grin; the expression he gave his partner was so much softer, however. "No worries there," he promised, pulling the younger man into a deep kiss, the kind that made it clear that Ianto was the centre of his world and had been for quite some time… not that he would have minded landing Sara in their bed before Gil came back into her life… or even the two of them now that Grissom seemed to be a permanent fixture… Gil wasn't bad looking for a man his age.

Ianto returned the kiss more ardently than usual. Jack understood.

"It's not too late to change your mind…"

The young man shook his head. "I'm just nervous about being away for so long." A whole year… Nine months for the pregnancy, three to 'settle in' whatever that was supposed to mean.

Jack had made Gwen stay home nearly that long. He was making her take desk duty for a full year after coming back to work from maternity leave, too.

Only now they were calling it family leave, because Jack insisted that the same conditions apply to his partner as well, once they returned. Ianto wondered if that wasn't Jack's real motivation for asking him if he wanted to have this baby… he'd been angling to get him out of the field for quite a while… and what does it say about me that I jumped at the chance to do this? the Welshman wondered.

Being stuck in the Hub most of the time would leave the rest of the team incredibly short staffed… never mind that at one time Jack had done it with just Suzie, Tosh and Owen. Even with both he and Gwen on light duty, that still left Bobby, Wendy, Abby, Tim, Sara, Mickey and Jack in the field – and there was very little likelihood that any of them would be taking family leave in the foreseeable future. Which, Ianto realized, was an odd thing to be thinking, standing on a strange planet in the year 4992…

"I'll have you back in a week's time, promise," the Doctor was saying. "Cross my hearts," he added, used his finger to make a big X over each side of his chest. "No one in Cardiff will even have time to miss you."

Ianto flashed a shy smile wondering again when and how exactly his life had gotten so strange.